Microsoft acquires app-provisioning startup FSLogix

Another day, another profitable exit for a well-regarded startup. Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Atlanta, Georgia-based FSLogix, the company behind the eponymous award-winning FSLogix app provisioning platform, for an undisclosed sum.

In a blog post, Brad Anderson, corporate vice president at Office 365, and Julia White, corporate vice president at Microsoft Azure, wrote that FSLogix’s technology would enable faster load times for user profiles in Outlook and OneDrive, leading to improved overall Office 365 performance in “multi-user virtual environments.”

“The way Microsoft 365 enables customers to shift to a modern desktop experience puts it at the heart of workplace transformation,” Anderson and White wrote. “From small businesses to very large global enterprises across numerous industries, FSLogix solutions enhance customer experience and productivity, while reducing support requirements for IT departments.”

FSLogix had raised $10.3 million in funding prior to the acquisition, according to CrunchBase. Its solutions suite, which is compatible with a swath of cloud vendors including Amazon, VMware, Citrix, and Red Hat, targeted customers with 1,000 to 50,000 users.

“When we launched FSLogix in 2012, our goal was to build software that helped customers reduce the amount of resources, time, and labor required to support virtual desktops,” FSLogix cofounder and CTO Randy Cook wrote in a statement. “Our first two products, FSLogix Apps and FSLogix Profile Container, focused on addressing critical needs that have existed from the dawn of desktop virtualization [and our] most recent product, Office 365 Container, is designed to enhance the Microsoft Office 365 experience in those virtual desktop environments … Although it’s still business as usual, FSLogix will soon integrate with Microsoft and join the strength of its enterprise productivity solutions and global reach.”

FSLogix Apps, one of its flagship solutions, is a software agent that enables virtual desktop administrators to manage per-user applications by presenting only the apps, add-ins, fonts, printers, and folders they’re allowed to see by organization- or administrator-defined policy. FSLogix Profile Container and Office 365 Container, meanwhile, store profile data locally as it’s being used in a “Cloud Cache” that sits between user’s desktop and remote container storage, reducing network and file server load. (The Cloud Cache — which supports Azure Page Blobs and Premium Page Blobs — can also be configured to store containers in more than one location at the same time, on-premises or in the cloud.)

The FSLogix acquisition dovetails with Microsoft’s recently announced Windows Virtual Desktop, a cloud-based service that offers a Windows 10 experience “optimized” for Office 365 ProPlus and includes free Windows 7 Extended Security Updates.

“Through customer engagement, we know that Microsoft Office applications are some of the most highly used and most commonly virtualized applications in any business,” Anderson and White wrote. “We are excited to welcome FSLogix to Microsoft, and we look forward to the impact its technology and its people will have on our customers’ virtualization experience.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how FSLogix’s workforce — which is spread across its headquarters and satellite offices in Salt Lake City, Denver, Boston, the Netherlands, and London — would be impacted by today’s news. We’ve reached out for comment and will update this story when we hear back.